It hurts me to write this post. It really does. But I have to.

I recently read Lucky Day by Chuck Tingle. Those of you who’ve followed this blog for a while know that I am a huge supporter of Chuck Tingle — I believe in what he does, and I love his relentless positivity in the face of the abject horror that is **waves hands around at the world in general**. However, I have an issue with Lucky Day that I can’t ignore.

There are very few uses of the word “said“.

And, worse, there are at least half a dozen uses of the word “stated“.

Look, I get it. Every writer has a style. And honestly I don’t entirely blame Tingle for this one. This should’ve been caught in the editing process. The editor made a deliberate choice not to change at least some of the dialogue tags to “said”, or work with Tingle to rewrite the paragraphs so that instead of using a dialogue tag at all some sort of action is used to indicate what the dialogue should sound like.

Unfortunately, these types of choices stand out to me as a writer and frequent reader, and I can’t help but notice them. They detract from my enjoyment of the book — which is good, although personally I think Bury Your Gays was better. I’ll still support Tingle, and I’ll still buy his books, but I really hope that in future books his editor makes the dialogue tags at least a little less obvious.

And eliminates the use of “stated” altogether.